About That Wish: What if It Came True?

The Change-Up

Within the first three minutes of the body-swapping, farcical bromance “The Change-Up,” a gurgling baby boy unleashes a projectile explosion of poop into his daddy’s face during a morning diaper change. That muddy moment tells you exactly where you’ll be during the movie’s next hundred-plus minutes: toddling back and forth between the toilet and a sandbox stocked with inflatable sex dolls.

The bodies swapped belong to the daddy, Dave Lockwood (Jason Bateman), and his bachelor buddy, Mitch Planko (Ryan Reynolds). They have been best friends since third grade, though the movie offers no indication of any underlying kinship. A successful corporate lawyer in Atlanta, gunning for a partnership, Dave is a dour workaholic with an attractive, high-strung wife, Jamie (Leslie Mann), and three young children. He is so uptight that he blanches when a colleague raises an eyebrow over his necktie’s double Windsor knot.

Mitch, an unemployed actor whose major credit is a role in a bologna commercial, is an extreme caricature of what used to be called a “toxic bachelor.” Still, he has no dearth of ravenous partners. It is a perfect role for Mr. Reynolds, Hollywood’s ranking male bimbo, whose infantile Mitch is so vacantly chirpy that he remains blissfully unaware that his lustful, foul-mouthed remarks to women might be the tiniest bit offensive.

Kvetching about their petty discontents one drunken evening while urinating side by side into a public fountain, Dave and Mitch declare that they would like to live each other’s lives. With a lightning flash, Atlanta momentarily blacks out. When the lights return, the brooding expression on the face of the fountain’s statue has become a smirk.

The next morning they discover that their idle wish has come true. When Dave turns to the mirror, he sees Mitch, and vice versa. Discovering that the magic fountain has been removed, they panic. Until it is restored in a new location, they’re stuck.

The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn’t explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie’s relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses “The Hangover” in gleeful crudeness and profanity. The similarities between the two movies aren’t coincidental: Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have written both. David Dobkin, the director of “The Change-Up,” is best known for “Wedding Crashers.”

Once inside Dave’s body, Mitch is a criminally careless surrogate father who plunks his twin babies on a kitchen counter, where they clutch at knives and meat cleavers, reach into food processors, and explore electrical outlets. To Jamie’s chagrin, her husband advises their oldest daughter to lash back at a bullying fellow ballet student. “Violence is good,” he declares. Jamie has no idea what has happened to him. She knows only that something is terribly wrong.

Mitch, in inappropriate golf clothes, swaggers into Dave’s law firm, where he derails a deal with a high-powered Japanese company with his frat-boy language and joshing racism. But he does manage to make a promising connection with Sabrina (Olivia Wilde), a luscious legal associate.

Dave, cowering inside Mitch’s body, auditions for a “lorn” (light pornography) movie and is instructed to do nasty things to its grotesque, surgically altered female star.

The big questions: Will Mitch, who has always secretly coveted Jamie, have his way with her? And in the end, whose penis belongs to whom?

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Mr. Bateman and Mr. Reynolds play together reasonably well, although their age difference (Mr. Reynolds is several years younger) is glaring. If both are adept comedians, neither has the wherewithal to begin to impersonate the other’s body language and thereby raise the farce to a higher comic level.

Inevitably succumbing to schmaltz, “The Change-Up” turns cloying in its perfunctory later scenes, in which each friend comes away from the ordeal having absorbed useful life lessons while in the body of his polar opposite. No matter how diligently “The Change-Up” scrubs itself, it leaves behind a faint if unmistakable scent from its initial eruption.

Directed by David Dobkin; written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore; director of photography, Eric Edwards; edited by Lee Haxall and Greg Hayden; music by John Debney; production design by Barry Robison; costumes by Betsy Heimann; produced by Mr. Dobkin and Neal H. Moritz; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.